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Home , Albrecht Haushofer, Beer Hall Putsch, Friedrich Ratzel, Geopolitik, Peter Gorski

Journal of Historical 47 (2015) 64e73

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Journal of Historical Geography

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Feature: European and World War II

Tangled complicities and moral struggles: the Haushofers, father and son, and the spaces of Nazi

Trevor J. Barnes a,* and Christian Abrahamsson b a Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada b Department of Sociology and , University of Oslo, Postboks 1096 Blindern, Oslo 0317, Norway

Abstract

Drawing on a biographical approach, the paper explores the tangled complicities and morally fraught relationship between the German father and son political geographers, Karl and , and the Nazi leadership. From the both Haushofers were influential within , although at different periods and under different circumstances. Karl Haushofer’s complicity began in 1919 with his friendship with , an undergraduate student he taught at the University of . Hess introduced Haushofer to the following year. In 1924 Karl provided jail-house instruction in German geopolitical theory to both men while they served an eight-and-a-half month prison term for following the ‘beer-hall putsch’ of . Karl’s prison lectures were significant because during that same period Hitler wrote . In that tract, Hitler justifies German expansionism using , one of Haushofer’s key ideas. It is here that there is a potential link between German geopolitics and the subsequent course of the Second World War. Albrecht Haushofer’s complicity began in the 1930s when he started working as a diplomat for in a think-tank within the Nazi Foreign Ministry. He carried out several secret missions including negotiations with the Czech government over the Nazi annexation of Sudetenland. Karl’s wife was Jewish, however, which according to Nazi Race Laws made Albrecht a [mixed-race]. Initially, Hess protected the family, but after he flew to Scotland in May 1941, circumstances became ever-more difficult for both Haushofers. Their tangled complicities and moral struggles were increasingly laboured and anguished, producing in the end tragic consequences. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Geopolitics; Karl Haushofer; Albrecht Haushofer; Nazism; Second World War

Höfgen with the Nazis during the period leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War.3 Höfgen begins the film as a socialist. To ‘The tragedy of geopolitics became at the same time a tragedy advance his own career, one that sees him eventually playing the of the Haushofer family.’1 lead role of Mephistopheles in Faust at the State theatre in , ‘From a moral standpoint much seems unsafe.’2 Höfgen deliberately cultivates friendships among the Nazi high command. Especially important is ‘the General’ (a stand-in for Mephisto, the 1981 academy award winning film based on a Herman Göring). As Höfgen’s star rises, he strives to be good: to 1936 novel of the same name by Klaus Mann (son of Thomas), protect his socialist and Jewish friends, as well as his black lover. explores the complicity of aspiring German stage actor Hendrik But he becomes only ever more ensnared within Nazism. His ability

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected].

1 C. Troll, Geographic science in during the period 1933e1945: a critique and justification, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 39 (1949) 99e137, 132 (emphasis in the original). 2 Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, Mafilm-Objektiv Studio (Budapest) (144 minutes) (1981). The quotation is taken from the English subtitles, minute 92. The film is available online at: http://musicalsoldmovie.blogspot.com/2013/10/mephisto.html (last accessed 7th September 2014). 3 In 1981 Mephisto won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto was first published in the Netherlands in German in 1936. The central character of the novel, Höfgen, was based on Gustaf Gründgens (1899e1963), a well-known German actor and later general manager and artistic director of the Prussian State Theatre after the Nazis took power. Gründgens had been Klaus Mann’s lover, brother-in-law and theatrical collaborator. Peter Gorski, a young boyfriend of Gründgens, and who for legacy reasons was adopted as Gründgens’ son, sued the German publisher of Mephisto for libel after his ‘father’ died in 1963. Although the decision initially went against Gorski, it was overturned on appeal, and subsequently affirmed by the German Supreme Court, although publication of the novel continued; A. Weiss, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, Chicago, 2010, 125e128, 259e260. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.10.002 0305-7488/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 65 to realise his own ends and to act on his moral conscience are of German geographers, as well as those in kindred fields like increasingly limited.4 Höfgen may play the role of Mephistopheles, urban and rural planning, location theory, landscape architecture but he becomes more like Dr Faustus selling his soul. Höfgen gains and agronomy.8 This was because the Nazi project was funda- the limelight he craves but struggles to maintain a ‘moral stand- mentally spatial.9 Specialised geographical knowledge was point’, something which in the world he now inhabits is in any case necessary to facilitate the Nazi’s political and ideological ends: ‘unsafe’ to uphold. conquering new space; occupying and rearranging the landscape; This paper is about similar tangled complicities and moral creating new spatial divisions; cordoning off particular sites struggles as they bear on two German geographers, Karl Haushofer through the deadly control of entry and exit; and moving large (1869e1946) and his son Albrecht Haushofer (1903e1945). Both numbers of people from one location to another (and for millions were political geographers and both were entangled with the Nazis. the last move they made). National ’s objectives In 1919, after a distinguished 35-year career in the military, Karl required deployment of geographers and similar experts to Haushofer began teaching at the University of Munich. Through one theorise, plan, organise and manage spatial processes and their of his early undergraduate students, Rudolf Hess, he met Adolf forms of change. Hitler. When Hitler and Hess were arrested in 1923 for their Some of those involved with the Nazis, such as the attempted coup of the Bavarian state government and sent to Walter Christaller, seemingly joined and participated willingly, prison, Haushofer senior provided the pair jail-house instruction in working for Konrad Meyer on Generalplan Ost, and accepting, like political geography over a period of four and a half months. This Höfgen, blandishments that advanced his career.10 Others were came at a formative period given that Hitler was writing Mein like the location theorist August Lösch. He worked alongside Kampf at exactly the same time. Albrecht Haushofer’s complicity Nazis, but neither became a Party member nor undertook Nazi with the Nazis derived primarily from acting as an advisor to work, keeping his moral conscience clear until the end.11 Another Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at the German Foreign Affairs location theorist, Andreas Predöhl, was much more complicit, Office and to Hitler at the 1938 Munich Conference when Czech joining the in 1937, becoming Rektor of Kiel University Sudetenland was handed over to Germany.5 Haushofer senior in 1942, but nevertheless holding on to some kind of moral called the latter event ‘a happy day in the history of geopolitics’.6 It standpoint by protecting dissidents at his university, and espe- seemingly vindicated his own geopolitical theories, those in which cially at the Institut für Weltwirtschaft that he directed, and which he had tutored Hitler in prison, and couched in such terms as included Lösch.12 Or, yet another example, the location theorist Lebensraum, Autarkie and German pan-regionalism.7 Later days, Alfred Weber who had no truck with Nazism. In April 1933 he however, were not as happy as Nazism tightened its grip on the resigned his chair after a brief fight with the Nazis about the lives of both Haushofers. Like Höfgen, the Haushofers’ complicity that they raised over the institute he directed at the with Nazism was complicated, not straightforward, and their moral University of Heidelberg.13 In short, there was a spectrum of re- standpoints were constrained and increasingly anguished. sponses by German geographers to Nazism and its attempt to The Haushofers were not the only geographers who were in enrol them, illustrating both different degrees of complicity, and such a position. The Nazis enlisted the expertise of large numbers different forms of struggle to maintain a moral centre. Both issues

4 , The Nazi Conscience, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 1e3, 14e16, argues that under Nazi ‘ethnic fundamentalism’ moral conscience for became defined only in relation to their membership of the . It meant, as Carl Schmitt put it, ‘not every being with a human face is human’. From Mephisto, however, it is clear that Höfgen’s ethical struggles are universal, and not limited to the narrow Volk definition. If Höfgen’s moral conscience were defined only by his membership of the Volk,he would have had no moral struggle. That he plainly did demonstrates his larger moral conscience. We will suggest this is also true for the Haushofers, the focus of our paper. 5 E. A. Walsh (S.J.), Total Power: A Footnote to History, New York, 1948, chapter 6. Ribbentrop was the first of the convicted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg to go to the scaffold. Herman Göring was supposed to be first, but he committed suicide, swallowing a smuggled cyanide pill two hours before he was scheduled to be hanged. 6 H. Herwig, , Haushofer, Hitler and Lebensraum, Journal of Strategic Studies 22 (1999) 218e241, 223. 7 In this paper we do not provide a detailed account of Karl Haushofer’s geopolitical theory, but instead focus on his life and that of his son Albrecht, and the relationship of both to the Nazis. There are numerous expositions and interpretations of Karl Haushofer’s theory in English beginning with A. Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer: Geopolitics in Action, New York, 1942 and D. Whittlesey (with the collaboration of C. C. Colby and R. Hartshorne), German Strategy of World Conquest, New York, 1942. More recent accounts include G. Ó Tuathail, : The Politics of Writing Global Space, Minneapolis, 1996, chapter 4; D. T. Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918e1933, Kent, OH, 1997; B. W. Blouet, Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth Century, 2nd revised edition, New York, 2004, 56e62; D. Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and , Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2006, chapter 2; and particularly useful, Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6), and H. Herwig, The daemon of geopolitics: Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, and Adolf Hitler, http://www.usafa.edu/df/dfh/docs/Harmon53.pdf, 2010 (last accessed 7th September 2014). 8 The role of spatial experts within National Socialism has been extensively discussed by Mechtild Rössler: M. Rössler, Applied geography and area research in Nazi society: central place theory and planning, 1933e1945, Environment and Planning. D: Society and Space 7 (1989) 419e431; M. Rössler, ‘Wissenschaft und Lebensraum’. Geographische Ostforschung im Nationalsocialismus: Ein Betraig zur Disziplingeschichte, , 1990; M. Rössler, Secret Nazi plans for Eastern Europe: geography and spatial planning in the Third Reich, Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia 35 (1993) 202e210; M. Rössler, ‘Area research’ and ‘Spatial planning’ from the to the German Federal Republic: creating a society with a spatial order under National Socialism, in: M. Renneberg, M. Walker (Eds), Science, Technology and National Socialism, Cambridge, 1994, 126e138; and M. Rössler, Geography and area planning under National Socialism, in: M. Szöllösi-Janze (Ed), Science in the Third Reich, Oxford and New York, 2001, 59e78. In addition, also see: H. Heske, Political geographers of the past III. German geographical research in the Nazi period: a content analysis of the major geography journals, 1925e1945, Political Geography Quarterly 5 (1986) 267e281; and G. Fehl, The Nazi garden city, in: S. V. Ward (Ed), The Garden City: Past, Present, and Future, London and New York, 1992, 88e105. 9 Aspects of the spatial character of the National Socialist project are discussed by: M. Bassin, Race contra space: the conflict between German Geopolitik and National Socialism, Political Geography Quarterly 6 (1987) 115e134; D. B. Clarke, M. A. Doel and F.X. McDonough, Holocaust topologies: singularity, politics and space, Political Ge- ography 15 (1996) 457e489; and T. J. Barnes and C. Minca, Nazi spatial theory: the dark of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (2013) 669e687. 10 Barnes and Minca, Nazi spatial theory (note 9); T. J. Barnes, ‘Desk killers’: Walter Christaller, central place theory, and the Nazis, in: D. Gregory, P. Meusburger, E.Wunder (Eds), Knowledge and Power. Knowledge and Space 8, The Klaus Tschira Symposia, Dordrecht, forthcoming. 11 R. H. Funck, J. S. Kowalski (Eds), Space-Structure-Economy: A Tribute to August Lösch, 2nd revised and extended edition, Baden, 2007. 12 E. Klee, Deutsche Medizin im Dritten Reich: Karrieren Vor und Nach 1945, Frankfurt am Main, 2001; R. Riegger, Three decades of August Lösch days in Heidenheim, in: Funck, Kowalski (Eds), Space-Structure-Economy (note 11), 401e406. 13 D. Gregory, Alfred Weber and location theory, in: D. R. Stoddart (Ed), Geography, and Social Concern, Totowa, NJ, 165e185; C. Loader, Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture 1890e1933, New York, 2012, chapter 9. 66 T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 are of concern in this paper as it examines the lives of Karl and Haushofer would later take up and promulgate. Ratzel proposed Albrecht Haushofer. an organic, Darwinian view of the state rooted in the soil, coining To do so, and following the introduction to this special issue, this the term that became so associated with Haushofer and partly paper takes a biographical approach.14 It is not biography for bio- through him with Hitler: Lebensraum, i.e., living space or living graphy’s sake, however. Our purpose is to use biography to illus- room.20 trate shifting forms of complicity, as well as the variable moral At age 18 Karl enlisted in an artillery regiment with the imperial exertions of both Haushofers as they tried to cope with their German army. He worked his way up the ranks becoming a recruitment into a deadly regime. In their case, the struggles were member of the general staff in 1899, and, by 1903, a teacher at the not only with themselves, and between themselves and the Nazis, Bavarian War Academy where he made Ratzel’s Politische Geo- but also with each other, as father and son.15 That this paper is graphie mandatory reading. In 1896 he had married Martha Mayer- concerned with only two individuals makes it about ‘minor his- Doss, the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish merchant from Man- tories’ as defined in the introduction to this special issue. That said, nheim, and with Martha had two sons, Albrecht (1903) and Heinz some have seen Karl Haushofer as a cause of ‘major histories’,an (1906). In 1908 Haushofer went to Japan for two years as a military ‘evil genius’, a Svengali who put words into Hitler’s mouth, and attaché, writing more than a dozen reports about what he saw, and whose phantom hand wrote the Führer’s memos and orders.16 what the German army might learn.21 Acquiring Japanese along the Sidney Alderman, reporting in September 1945 to the Office of way (it was one of seven languages he spoke), he admired enor- the US Chief of Council that considered which Nazis to prosecute for mously Meiji Japan’s economic, military and political accomplish- war crimes at Nuremburg, thought ‘Hitler was largely only a symbol ments. Returning to Germany in 1910 because of a pulmonary and a rabble-rousing mouthpiece. The content of which disorder, Haushofer took a three-year leave, turning his military he was the symbol was the doctrine of [Karl] Haushofer’.17 We reports into a doctoral dissertation at the University of Munich that argue it was not that straightforward. Karl Haushofer’s life and that documented and celebrated Japan’s successes: Dai Nihon, Betrach- of his son are instructive, we suggest, less because they were tungen über Groß-Japans Wehrkraft, Weltstellung und Zukunft [Re- responsible for major histories than because they exemplified the flections on Greater Japan’s Military Strength, World Position, and complicated relationship between Nazism and its use of academic Future].22 ‘Meiji Japan for the rest of his life became the model’,as labour; in this case the academic labour of geographers. In dis- Herwig writes.23 With the outbreak of in August 1914, cussing that relationship, we begin with Karl Haushofer, about Haushofer was recalled for military duty. His wife said he looked whom much has already been written, and then turn to his son ‘ten years younger’ after getting the news.24 Albrecht where the literature is sparser.18 Our conclusion turns on a It was a good war for Karl. He rose to the rank of Major set of wider themes around complicity, moral struggle, biography General, serving as a Brigade Commander on the Western Front. and the Nazis. Germany’s surrender in November 1918 left him gutted, however. And he felt humiliated and angry by the signing in June 1919 of the . The geopolitical tradition from Ratzel Karl Haushofer onwards, and to which he subscribed, was a programme for ac- tion. To theorize geopolitics was an opportunity, as the Heidelberg A long beginning geographer Alfred Hettner wrote in 1915, for the geographer to ‘become a “warrior of science”. [and] to help the “warrior of Karl Haushofer’s exposure to political geography came early. Born arms”’.25 That was Haushofer’s intention as he transformed in 1869 in Munich, Karl took hikes along the Isar River with his himself in the next phase of his life from Generalmajor to Herr father, Max, a professor and director at Munich’s School of Higher Professor Doktor. Technical Studies. They were sometimes joined by his father’s friend and colleague from the Geography Department, , who as they walked would discuss and ‘test his theories’.19 A spectacular middle In 1886 Ratzel left to take up the Chair of Geography at , and there literally wrote the book on political geography, Politische 1919 was also the year that Haushofer resigned from the army; Geographie (1897). It laid the foundations for the geopolitics that he completed his second dissertation, the Habilitation (Basic

14 In our specific case, a biographical method or approach means using a detailed account of the unfolding of the lives of Karl and Albrecht Haushofer to register the changing forms of their complicity with the Nazi state apparatus, and the constraints and tensions that ensued. There are other recent biographies within historical political geography that take a similar approach: N. Smith, American : Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Berkeley, 2005; G. Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of , Oxford, 2009. 15 Although father and son relationships are a literary staple, there are few father-son biographies of scientists. A notable exception is Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, New Haven, 2012. 16 J. J. Thorndike, Geopolitics: the lurid career of a scientific system which a Briton invented, the Germans used and Americans need to study, Life Magazine 16th December 1939, 106e115, 109. 17 Jacobson, Karl Haushofer, Volume 2, 568e569. 18 Our paper pieces together information from various types of secondary literature to construct our biographical approach to the two Haushofers in a way which examines the variable collusions of both men with the Nazis and their ensuing ethical predicaments. Where appropriate we critically contextualise some of those secondary sources. Herwig, The daemon of geopolitics (note 7), draws upon primary sources relating to Karl Haushofer, and suggests that a larger English language biographical study is in preparation. 19 Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6), 220. 20 On Friedrich Ratzel and his larger theory see: W. D. Smith, Friedrich Ratzel and the origins of Lebensraum, German Studies Review 3 (1980) 51e68; M. Bassin, and the state in Friedrich Ratzel’s political geography, in Human Geography 11 (1987) 473e495; C. Abrahamson, On the genealogy of Lebensraum, Geographica Helvetica 68 (2013) 37e44; Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6). 21 On Haushofer and Japan see: C. W. Spang, Karl Haushofer und Japan: Die Rezeption Seiner Geopolitischen Theorien in der Deutschen und Japanischen Politik, Munich, 2013. 22 K. E. Haushofer, Dai Nihon, Betrachtungen über Groß-Japans Wehrkraft, Weltstellung und Zukunft, Berlin, 1913. 23 Herwig, The daemon of geopolitics (note 7), 3. 24 Herwig, The daemon of geopolitics (note 7), 5. 25 Quoted in K. Klost, The conception of politics and political geography in geopolitics in Germany until 1945, Political Geography Quarterly 8 (1989) 369e385, 380. T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 67

Contours of the Geographical Development of the Japanese Empire That Hitler wrote Mein Kampf at Landsberg gives these jail- 1854-1919, and which passed summa cum laude); that he became house readings and instruction great import, potentially making an unpaid adjunct lecturer in the Department of Geography at Haushofer the most influential geographer of World War II. That Munich University; and, perhaps most momentous of all, that on said, Haushofer was not ‘the inexhaustible Idea Man for Hitler’ as 4th April 1919 at a social gathering he met Rudolf Hess, and, Life Magazine asserted in 1939.28 Nor did he, as Frederic Sondern through Hess, was later introduced to Adolf Hitler (probably in Jnr. suggested in a 1941 issue of Current History, supplant Hitler and July 1921).26 write Mein Kampf himself.29 Yet there was clearly complicity. Hitler Hess had fought in the Great War, first as an infantryman, later himself, not someone who gave credit lightly, hinted at Haushofer’s as an aviator. After the initial meeting with Haushofer in spring influence. He said to , Governor General of : 1919, Hess enrolled at the University of Munich for the start of the ‘Landsberg was my university education at state expense’.30 And, in autumn term, taking geography classes among others. Hess the early 1940s, he wrote that ‘Without my imprisonment, Mein became a close friend to Karl and his two sons, particularly Kampf would never have been written, and if I may say so, during Albrecht. The following year, May 1920, Hess heard Hitler speak in this time, after constant rethinking, many things that earlier had Munich, and was mesmerised. He joined the NSDAP and was been stated simply from intuition for the first time attained full assigned party membership number 16. Three years later, Nazi clarity’.31 membership had burgeoned. The intent of the Party was to foment The International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg thought widespread social discord with the ultimate aim of overthrowing Haushofer might be guilty at some level. He was interviewed the Weimar republic. Between the 8th and 9th of November 1923, several times in the autumn of 1945 both at Hartschimmelhof, Hitler, along with other Nazi leaders including Hess, as well as 600 Karl Haushofer’s farmhouse in , and at Nuremburg. The (SA) (Brownshirts), tried to depose the Bavarian interviewer was Fr. Edmund Walsh, S.J.32 By happy coincidence State Commissioner as he was speaking to a crowd of three Walsh was a Jesuit priest (Haushofer was a lapsed Catholic), US thousand people at a Munich city centre Bierkeller. The ‘beer-hall Army officer, fluent German speaker, and professor of political putsch’, as it was called, failed. Hitler was arrested. Hess initially science at Georgetown University specializing in geopolitics, went into hiding, including briefly at Haushofer’s Munich apart- especially of the German kind, and Haushofer’s kind in partic- ment, but he later gave himself up. Hitler and Hess were found ular.33 Walsh said that his interviews with Haushofer were like a guilty of treason, sentenced to five years at Landsberg Fortress graduate seminar in political science at an American university. prison outside Munich. In the end they each served only eight- The big difference, of course, was that there were potentially and-a-half months. mortal consequences for one of the participants if they said the Landsberg may have looked like a prison on the outside, but wrong thing. Haushofer was very cautious, playing down any conditions inside were remarkably comfortable. It was there that influence, suggesting that Hitler and even Hess lacked the intel- Hitler had the time and resources to write Mein Kampf. He had a lectual wherewithal to understand his ideas.34 He told Walsh that secretary, Rudolf Hess, to take dictation; and, to fill in the many Hess’s ‘strong side was not intelligence, rather heart and char- gaps in his education, a university professor, Karl Haushofer. acter’. He described Hitler as a ‘half-educated’ man who ‘never Haushofer travelled the 100 km from Munich to Landsberg on understood the principles of geopolitics transmitted to him’. Wednesdays between 24th June and 12th November 1924. In ses- Hitler, Haushofer said, focused only upon ‘selected. catch words sions both in the morning and the afternoon he instructed Hitler which he did not comprehend’.35 and Hess. This included readings in philosophy from Nietzsche and With an indictment for war crimes hanging in the balance, this is Marx, in military studies from Bismarck and von Clausewitz, and in perhaps what one would have expected Haushofer to say. In other political geography and geopolitics from Ratzel, Kjellén, and parts of the interview with Walsh, Haushofer was caught lying, and Haushofer’s own works, especially Dai Nihon, and essays from a whitewashing past prejudicial statements. When Walsh confronted newly founded journal edited by Haushofer and others, Zeitschrift him with evidence of backtracking and prevarication, Haushofer für Geopolitik (the first issue of which was published in January claimed ‘the poor memory belonging to an old man’.36 At another 1924).27 juncture, faced with a blatant contradiction between his interview

26 A. Fischer, Haushofer, Karl Ernst, in: D. Coetzee, L. W. Eysturli (Eds), Philosophers of War: The Evolution of History’s Greatest Military Thinkers, Volume 2, Santa Barbara, 2013, 46e49, 47. 27 This account is derived from Walsh, Total Power (note 5); Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6); and W. Natter, Geopolitics in Germany, 1919e1945: Karl Haushofer and the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, in: J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, G. Toal (Eds), The Companion to Political Geography, Oxford, 2003, 187e203. 28 Germany’s brain trust, Life Magazine 20th , 60e66, 60. 29 F. Sondern Jnr., Hitler’s scientists, Current History June 1941, 10e12, 47. 30 Quoted in I. Kershaw, Hitler 1889e1936: Hubris, London, 1998, 240. 31 Quoted in Herwig, The daemon of geopolitics (note 7), 10. 32 E. A. Walsh (S.J.), The mystery of Haushofer, Life Magazine 16th September 1946, 107e120; Walsh, Total Power (note 5). 33 On Walsh’s life see: L. J. Gallagher (S.J.), Edmund A. Walsh S.J.: A Biography, New York, 1962; G. Ó Tuathail, Spiritual geopolitics: Fr. Edmund Walsh and Jesuit anticom- munism, in: K. Dodds, D. Atkinson (Eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, London, 2000, 187e210; P. McNamara, A Catholic Cold War: Edmond S. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American Anticommunism, New York, 2005. Walsh was vehemently anti-communist. As an ‘Expert Consultant’ to the U.S. Chief of Counsel at the it was alleged that Walsh strove to keep out of the public record any collusion between the , especially the Jesuit order, and the Nazis. Consequently, Walsh’s own position should be taken into account in assessing his judgment of Haushofer. The evidence from Walsh’s papers, which have been thoroughly examined by McNamara, is that Haushofer was not given any special treatment. Walsh believed that Haushofer ‘was morally and legally guilty of participation in a pre- meditated cause of wanton aggression’, and that he was ‘as guilty as the better known criminals’ (Walsh quoted in McNamara, A Catholic Cold War, 126). Nonetheless, Walsh gave Haushofer a certificate exempting him from standing trial at Nuremburg. It was in exchange for Haushofer writing an essay ‘repudiating the Nazi application of his teachings’, which Walsh’s boss, Chief Counsel H. Jackson, believed would be ‘far more profitable from an educational point of view than would result from putting Haushofer in the dock’ (quoted in McNamara, A Catholic Cold War, 125, 126). 34 He thought none of the Nazi high command except von Neurath had the mental capacity to understand his theories (Walsh, The mystery of Haushofer (note 32), 117). He said of von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister: ‘I even had to teach him how to read a map’ (Walsh, Total Power (note 5), 15). 35 Quotes from Walsh, The mystery of Haushofer (note 32), 110, 117; and Walsh, Total Power (note 5), 15. 36 Walsh, Total Power (note 5), 18. 68 T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 statements and his earlier published writing, Haushofer broke down After Hitler gained power in 1933 the spatial elements found in sobbing. ‘It was another shattering moment in a shattered world’ Mein Kampf were worked out on the ground. That was one of the commented Walsh.37 Like so many German academics Haushofer results of the Munich Conference. Haushofer thought it was such ‘a had contributed to the Nazi project. Unlike a Wernher von Braun happy day for geopolitics’ because his theory became reality, and designing V-2 rockets, or a Walter Christaller re-planning the brought into being a new Nazi German geopolitical world. When annexed Warthegau landscape according to central place theory, in Germany invaded Poland Haushofer was even more enthused. In a Karl Haushofer’s case it was perhaps more fundamental because his letter to Hess in October 1939, Haushofer wrote: ‘How many times role extended beyond technical implementation.38 Haushofer did we in our most academic dreams conjure up world-political contributed to Hitler’s ‘university education’, potentially enabling the visages of spaces as have now been realised. It is a shame to be future Führer to attain ‘full clarity’. Haushofer therefore was not 70 years old and to be able to serve only as a cultural-political simply an engineer or bureaucrat, following instructions, but possibly umbrella from behind the scene’.45 someone who had a hand in shaping the instructions themselves. Of course, between the months of June and November 1924, In particular, Karl Haushofer provided a geographical sensibility. when Haushofer tutored at Landsberg he did not know Hitler was National Socialism was obsessed by space and spatial categories, going to become Führer; he did not know that Mein Kampf would and by spatial transformation. We are not claiming that the sell over 12 million copies; he did not know that the book would be obsession originated with Haushofer, but given Haushofer’s the template for National Socialism; and he did not know that formative influence on Hess, and the instruction of Hitler at Lebensraum would culminate in the Final Solution. But as those Landsberg, some of his geographical imaginary and vocabulary things came to pass, Haushofer rarely complained, nor did he slip presumably struck a chord. In his 1940 Preface to a new edition of into the background. Rather, he pushed himself forward, becoming Ratzel’s book, Haushofer ‘proudly recounted how he had left a a spokesperson for the regime, explicating and justifying its “well-read” copy of Ratzel’s Political Geography behind him after a geopolitical strategies. Haushofer became ‘a ubiquitous presence in visit in 1924 to , where from his cell Hitler was the German media. spreading the message of Germany’s shortage busy dictating the first draft of Mein Kampf to his assistant, Hess’’.39 of living space “by a thousand channels”’.46 Walsh recognised Haushofer’sinfluence on Mein Kampf.Hewrote His honours and achievements piled up as National Socialism that Haushofer provided Mein Kampf with ‘a line of argument, a became increasingly prominent. His role as a public intellectual thesis, and a series of geographical facts weighted with geographical began in 1924. That year he started making monthly radio significance.. This graduation from rabble-rousing to the elemen- broadcasts on the Deutsche Welle and Bayerische Rundfunk net- tary stages of geopolitics is too striking and circumstantial to be mere works, teaching geopolitics and becoming an ‘educator of the coincidence’.40 Specifically, Walsh says of Mein Kampf’s chapter 14 on Volk’.47 The same year he was one of the founding four editors of German policy in Eastern Europe that one ‘can almost feel the the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, becoming its sole editor in 1931. The presence of Haushofer’.41 In that chapter Hitler wrote: journal was progressively influenced by the Nazis, with a separate working group forming in 1932, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Geo- Germany must find the courage to gather our people and politik, catering to National Socialist interests. Its monthly circu- their strength for an advance along the road that will lead lation rose from between 300,000 and 400,000 in the late 1920s to this people from its present restricted living space [Lebens- 750,000 at its height in 1933, and it was sold at newsstands across raum] to new land and soil.. [I]t is not in colonial acquisi- the Reich.48 In 1933, the year the Nazis took power, Haushofer tions that we must see the solution of this problem, but became President of the German Academy (serving 1933e1937); exclusively in the acquisition of a territory for settlement.42 head of the Volksdeutscher Rat (1933) (a body charged with help- Here Hitler made Lebensraum the moving force. It demanded ing scientific associations in Germany and abroad); and a perma- Germany’s further possession of territory; it justified German nent, full-time paid Professor of Geography at the University of expansionism. Hitler uses Lebensraum twice in Mein Kampf,and‘11 Munich (1933).49 The next year he was invited on to the editorial times in his unpublished “” of 1928’.43 For Hitler it was a board of the NSDAP-owned Ullstein publishing company that term with traction. Invented by Ratzel in Politsche Geographie, controlled six of Germany’s largest circulation newspapers.50 And Lebensraumwas deployed and exemplified by Haushofer in Dai Nihon. in that same year Haushofer was also recruited to Deputy Führer The term then featured in the very first issue of the Zeitschrift für Hess’s Reichsreform commission, charged with changing the Geopolitik (January 1924), the one that Haushofer took to Landsberg regional divisions (Gaue) within Germany, and which Haushofer as an instructional text for teaching geopolitics to his two ‘pupils’.44 saw as an opportunity to expand the country’s by

37 Walsh, The mystery of Haushofer (note 32), 114. 38 See respectively: W. Biddle, Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich, and the Space Race, New York, 2012; and T. J. Barnes, Notes from the underground: why the history of matters: the case of Central Place Theory, Economic Geography 88 (2012) 1e26. 39 Bassin, Race contra space (note 9), 127. 40 Walsh, Total Power (note 5), 41. 41 Walsh, Total Power (note 5), 42. 42 A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 2, chapter 14, Eastern orientations or Eastern policy, originally published in German in 1926. An English translation of the two volumes is available on-line at http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/ and from which the quote is taken; last accessed 7th September 2014. 43 Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6), 226. 44 Kershaw, Hitler 1889e1936 (note 30), 248 suggests that while Hitler would likely have been familiar with Lebensraum before Landsberg, ‘it seems highly likely that Haushofer’s [writings and teachings] were one significant source of his notion of Lebensraum’. 45 Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6), 234. 46 Murphy, The Heroic Earth (note 7), 106. 47 Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6), 232. 48 Natter, Geopolitcs in Germany (note 27). 49 D. H. Norton, Karl Haushofer and the German Academy, Central European History 1 (1968) 80e99; H. Heske, Karl Haushofer: his role in German geopolitics and in Nazi politics, Political Geography Quarterly 6 (1987) 135e144; 141. 50 Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6), 231e232. T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 69 annexing adjoining territories (as later happened in Czech Sude- ‘whisked away to Theresienstadt [concentration camp] or tenland, and Poland).51 Auschwitz’.56 Haushofer was increasingly marginalized. It only got worse after his son, Albrecht, was identified as one of the plotters in the failed A bad end von Stauffenberg attempt to blow-up Hitler at the Wolfsschanze command complex in Poland on 20th July 1944. While Albrecht Even in Haushofer’s salad days of power and influence life was was on the run, several members of the Haushofer family including precarious. That was clear as early as the ‘’ Karl, his other son Heinz, and even a grandchild, were held at (30th June/1st July 1934), when even the seemingly most loyal Dachau concentration camp. Albrecht was finally caught in Nazis, SA members including its leader Ernst Röhm, were murdered December 1944, and incarcerated in a special wing at the ’s in a purge. While Haushofer wrote to Hess to congratulate him on Moabit prison in Berlin.57 his role in that night’s work, Haushofer was not always loyal to Hitler. He declined to review Mein Kampf in the Zeitschrift, saying it Albrecht Haushofer had little to do with geopolitics.52 He also never became a Nazi party member. It is not entirely clear why. In December 1938 he was During the four months Albrecht was at Moabit he wrote 80 son- asked by his Dean at Munich University to explain his non- nets. Sonnet 38 is called ‘My Father’, and it is about Karl’s complicity membership, and he replied enigmatically that it was for ‘the with the Nazis. It drew on the imagery of an Asian legend about an 53 purpose of camouflage’. Was it camouflage to allow him to finger evil spirit sealed in the body of a fish. If the fish was caught, but not critics of Hitler who would think him a potential ally, or was it immediately put back into the sea, evil would escape into the camouflage for himself, enabling him to believe that his own role world. Albrecht suggested in his poem that is what his father and complicity within the regime was limited? allowed to happen: But Hitler was not always so keen on Haushofer either. After ’ Landsberg they met only a dozen times, the last in . It once lay within the strength of his [Karl Haushofer s] will One of the issues was Haushofer’s Jewish wife, Martha, and through to plunge the daemon back into its durance.. her his Mischling (‘cross-breed’) sons, Albrecht and Heinz. Under Nazi race laws anyone who had at least one Jewish grandparent was But my father broke away the seal. a Mischling. From 1933 Hess functioned as the family minder, He did not see the rising breath of evil. providing on three separate occasions a Schutzbrief (a writ of pro- 58 tection) to make them ‘honorary Aryans’.54 That worked until only He let the daemon soar into the world. 10th May 1941, when Hess, unknown to the Nazi leadership, flew to The ‘daemon’ is Hitler; the evil is Nazism. Albrecht is pointing to Scotland ostensibly to see the Duke of Hamilton to discuss the that moment back in Landsberg Prison, or possibly even before, possibility of negotiating peace between Germany and the UK. Hess when Karl first met Hitler in Munich, or maybe even before that was arrested and put into prison, first in the UK and then, following when he first met Hess. Karl could have done something. Instead he a conviction for war crimes at Nuremburg, for the rest of his life at ‘broke away the seal’; he encouraged the daemon; he allowed evil Spandau, East Berlin. Hess’s absence left the Haushofer family to soar. vulnerable. There was a suspicion that because of the close family friendship the Haushofers, especially Albrecht, had known in advance about Hess’s flight, and may well have had a hand in it.55 His father’s son Both Haushofers were questioned by the Gestapo, their houses searched, and ominously Hitler began referring to Karl as the Born in 1903, Albrecht came of age during the tumultuous years of ‘Jewish professor’. Haushofer told Walsh that, once Hess left, he the newly founded Weimar republic.59 At 14, one of Albrecht’s ‘lived under the sword of Damocles’, fearing his wife would be friends from the Theresienwiese Gymnasium in Munich that he

51 In spite of these many accomplishments, and contrary to claims made by Reader’s Digest, Life Magazine and Current History, Haushofer never established an Institute of Geopolitics. On 20th November 1939 Life Magazine reported his Institute employed a staff of 1000, and ‘remade. the world. everyday between breakfast and dinner’ (60). But no such institute existed. When American troops went to the University of Munich to locate it, they found only an old man, Karl Haushofer, sitting by himself in a university office (Natter, Geopolitics in Germany (note 27), 189). Norton, Karl Haushofer and the German Academy (note 49), 97e98, contends that the rumour of the institute was a result of the Anglophone press confusing Haushofer’s Presidency of the German Academy with his position as Professor of Geography at Munich University. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (note 7), chapter 4, further suggests that the American media spread the belief about the existence of the institute for reasons, ironically inflating Haushofer’sinfluence when his actual status within Nazism had waned. 52 Herwig, Geopolitik (note 6), 225. 53 Letter to the Dean, 24th December 1938, quoted in Norton, Karl Haushofer and the German Academy (note 49), 88. 54 Bassin, Race contra space (note 9), 126. 55 Albrecht indeed knew of Hess’s flight (although Karl claimed at least to Walsh that he didn’t know). Albrecht corresponded with the Duke of Hamilton to facilitate the meeting using a fake Lisbon address as cover. When Hess arrived in Scotland he had in his pocket calling cards from both Albrecht and Karl Haushofer, see Heske, Karl Haushofer (note 49), 139. 56 Walsh, The mystery of Haushofer (note 32), 110e112. 57 A. Brodersen, Albrecht Haushofer 1903e1945, in: A. Haushofer, Moabit Sonnets, trans. M. D. Herter Norton, New York, 1978 [first published in German in 1946], 165e179, 165. 58 Haushofer, Moabit Sonnets (note 57), Sonnet 38: My Father, 77e78. 59 Surprisingly little has been written on Albrecht Haushofer. The major work is U. Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer und der Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beitrag zur Zeitge- schichte, Stuttgart, 1974; a more recent work is the slim volume E. Haiger, A. Ihering and C. F. Von Weizsäcker, Albrecht Haushofer, Ebenhausen, 2008; and in 2011 Die Gesellschaft für Erdkunde Berlin organized a large exhibition on Albrecht Haushofer, http://www.gfe-berlin.de/Veranstaltungen/Haushofer/haushofer.html (last accessed 7th September 2014). 70 T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 attended asked what he wanted to be. Without hesitation, he said and his brother Heinz were Mischlinge. This became particularly ‘Germany’s foreign minister’.60 While his reply reflected his pre- pressing with the introduction on 11th April 1933 of Gesetz zur cociousness, it also indicated his class membership in the Bavarian Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums [The Law for the Resto- elite, and the absorption of his father’s theory of geopolitics.61 ration of the Professional Civil Service]. It aimed to Aryanise the That inculcation continued as Albrecht completed a degree in civil service, excluding those with Jewish ancestry from serving as geography and history at the University of Munich, graduating in judges, professors, or in other government positions. For Albrecht 1924. The next year he completed his Ph.D. thesis, Pass-Staaten in this would have meant losing his secretaryship of the Geographical den Alpen [Mountain pass countries in the Alps], supervised by the Society and editorship of its journal. He seriously considered geographer and polar explorer . Although emigrating.65 He held back because his mother would not leave the Albrecht did not use the term geopolitics in the dissertation, it was country. His relationship with his father was also put under severe clearly influenced by his father’s work, and was published in 1928 pressure. On 7th May 1933, Albrecht wrote an embittered letter to in the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik book series. his mother about his father’s passive acceptance of the new racial In the summer of 1924 Albrecht left Munich for Berlin to take up policies: a position as assistant to the acclaimed physical geographer Albrecht Penck. He was to work with Penck on his Habilitation on I am happy for father’s and Heinz’s optimism, though I fi 62 the loess elds of Hungary, but that work was never completed. cannot understand it. I can honestly not say much ’ Albrecht s true interest was always in geopolitics, and he also regarding father’s political letters. I am happy that he can see began receiving other more appealing offers. In 1927 he was elected opportunities to work e in the same state that proclaims his secretary of the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin [The Berlin sons as unfit for civil service (I have carefully read the new Geographical Society], one of the most prestigious geographical protocol on the Berufsbeamtengesetz and I find little reas- societies in Germany. The following year he was appointed editor surance therein).. One cannot plane wood without shavings e ’ (serving 1928 1938) of that society s journal, Zeitschrift der is a nice proverb; but when some of the shavings are one’s fi Gesellschaft ir Erdkunde. Travelling the world in the late 1920s and friends and acquaintances things look rather different. I don’t early 1930s on Society business, he managed also to turn out know whether or not I should envy or admire the blindness scholarly papers, mainly in political geography, including for his that cannot see how close to us the plane irons already are.66 father’sownZeitschrift. Rudolf Hess interceded, issuing two Deutschblütigkeitserklär- ungen [German Blood Certificates] that made Albrecht and Heinz Éminence Grise officially Aryans (at least for a period). Although certification allowed Albrecht to continue working for the Society, he felt On 26th October 1929, a young and ambitious Albrecht wrote to his strongly that the new regime was flawed. He increasingly saw that father about his desire to be more involved in German politics, he did not fit within the new German world, questioning even his 67 albeit as an éminence grise: father’s geopolitics. On 22nd June 1933, Albrecht wrote to his parents: ‘Concerning geopolitics I am afraid that it is too close to fl It is my intention to acquire a decisive in uence, though not political power. In the longer perspective this will mean that I too much in the limelight. I am still too young for that and the cannot accept it. During the past 6 months every commentary [in ’ . situation isn t yet tense enough On another matter do you the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik] has been a pain to me, I ponder it for ’ fi know anything about Hess that isn t con dential but never- days to be able to come to the necessary compromise between ’ theless is of interest and that can be redirected? Please don t truth, inner conviction and what is permissible’.68 This was 63 mention to anyone that I asked. Albrecht’s version of tangled complicity. But in pain or not, he Like many German and scholars, Albrecht was nonetheless accepted a lectureship in political geography at the becoming entangled in the future Third Reich. But he was by no Deutsche Hochschule für Politik [German Academy for Politics] in 69 means convinced by either its rhetoric or ideology. He wrote to his Berlin that Hess arranged for him that same year. He later became 70 father on 8th June 1932 that ‘Rudi Hess and his peers are beyond Professor in 1940, transferring to the University of Berlin. salvation’.64 With these acts of assistance, Rudolf Hess repaid the debt he Spring 1933 was a watershed given that Hitler came to power owed Karl Haushofer for sheltering him after the failed beer-hall during the winter of that year. German intellectuals who previously putsch in 1923. Albrecht now felt in debt to Hess. In a letter to remained undecided needed either to leave or to stay. Klaus Mann Hess dated 7th September 1933, Albrecht wrote: ‘I could not have and his father Thomas left. Other intellectuals like Martin Heideg- accepted this extraordinary privilege [the job at the Deutsche ger and Carl Schmitt stayed, both joining the NSDAP in May 1933. Hochschule] e not even for my father’s sake e had I not felt that, For the Haushofer family the situation was complicated. Albrecht should the occasion arise, I would be prepared to make a personal

60 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 17. 61 Albrecht’s home life was swaddled in the ‘rich intellectual and artistic culture. of the German high-bourgeois’. Apart from becoming a professor of geography, Albrecht was a serious playwright, a poet, musician and composer. Brodersen, Albrecht Haushofer (note 57), 166; R. S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in , 3rd edition, London and New York, 2013, 100. 62 Heske, Karl Haushofer (note 49), 138. 63 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 290. 64 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 300. 65 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 308. 66 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 306. 67 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 311. 68 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 311. 69 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 116. 70 Heske, Karl Haushofer (note 49), 138. T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 71 contribution for you as a man.’71 This began Albrecht’s moral high- number of British diplomats, a consequence of initially meeting wire act that lasted for the next eight years. He tried to balance his them at the Berlin Olympiad in 1936 and then seeing them again moral convictions against an obligation to practice his geographical when, as Hess’s envoy, he visited von Ribbentrop in London, who intelligence for a regime he knew to be corrupt. had been appointed German Ambassador to the UK. He wrote in a That balancing act became acute from the summer of 1934. Hess 1937 commentary for Zeitschrift für Geopolitik: ‘If one had visited appointed Albrecht as his personal advisor in the Dienststelle Rib- England in the spring of 1937 it would be impossible not to draw bentrop [the Ribbentrop Department], an international policy think- the conclusion that neither Italy nor Japan (not even the Soviet tank that ran parallel to Foreign Affairs. For the rest of the decade Union!) are considered public enemy number one. They (the En- Albrecht’s work was divided between the university and the Dien- glish) are again looking across the North sea.’76 ststelle. In the latter role, Albrecht took on a number of secret Among the British diplomats, the Marquis of Douglas and diplomatic missions in Great Britain, Japan and Eastern Europe. A Clydesdale, later the Duke of Hamilton, became a close personal particularly important one was in mid November 1937, when he and friend. Clydesdale visited the Haushofer family at Hart- Count von Trauttmansdorf clandestinely met the Czech President schimmelhof, and Albrecht stayed more than once at Clydesdale’s Edvard Benes and Foreign Minister Kamil Krofta to discuss Sude- home, Dungavel. These connections allowed Albrecht to anticipate tenland. The region had been ceded to Czechoslovakia in the Treaty the British reaction to German claims to Czechoslovakia, Poland of Versailles, but Hitler wanted it back.72 The program that Albrecht and Austria. In May and June of 1938 Albrecht wrote perhaps his and others agreed at their secret meeting contained five points: 1) a most important report to von Ribbentrop outlining the expected non-aggression pact between Germany and Czechoslovakia; 2) British response to any German territorial expansion. A German concurrence about cultural independence of the Sudetenland; 3) a military attack on Bohemia, Albrecht suggested, would provide policy of increasing trade between the two countries; 4) a ‘news- Britain and France casus belli to intervene militarily.77 paper peace’ between the two countries, that is, no negative press His influence on von Ribbentrop, appointed Minister of Foreign against Germans living in Czechoslovakia; and 5) a stipulation that Affairs in February 1938, waned as the prospect of war became more the Hapsburg family would not regain power in Austria.73 likely. Albrecht wrote to his father on 22nd August 1938: ‘Of course I Albrecht reported the meeting and subsequent diplomatic ne- am aware that the chance exists that London will find a way to make gotiations to his father using Japanese words as a code to refer to Berlin realise the gravity of the situation e but our prospects of particular individuals. Tomodachi, which means friend, was for reaching the winter without a war appears to me at best as one to Hess; Fukon, meaning ‘I will not bend’, was Ribbentrop; and four. Once one views things in this light one cannot help but prepare O’Daijin, meaning the leader or Great Spirit, was Hitler. In a letter oneself internally and externally’.78 After the Munich Conference, sent to his father on 19th January 1937, Albrecht wrote: Albrecht left the Dienststelle. He was increasingly regarded as Hess’s spy, and his Jewish ancestry was also used against him. He further My own presentation for O’Daijin was, this time, more a feared that the war the Nazis were planning against Czechoslovakia lecture. He listened and asked intelligent questions. would not be contained, spiralling into global conflict. Personally he was charming, in his attitude more peaceful, In the end it was not the Nazi take-over of Czechoslovakia that more superior than before Christmas. What I keep noticing provoked global conflict, but the German invasion of Poland on 1st with him e at least at those times when he relates to the September 1939. Albrecht was recalled to work for Ribbentrop, this individual and not the masses e is the powerful application time within the intelligence division of Foreign Affairs.79 From the of ‘common sense’ in the English meaning of the words.74 letters that Albrecht wrote to his parents during the autumn of During the years leading up to the war, Albrecht went on several 1939, the high-wire act he had performed from 1933 was more and other similar missions. His usual objectives were to gather intelli- more difficult. It was no longer even safe to send letters. In a 13th gence, and to establish diplomatic relations. Throughout this December 1939 letter to his mother, which his father carried from period, Albrecht’s aim was to keep Germany out of a new war. He Berlin to Munich, Albrecht expressed deep despair: ‘I loathe the wrote to his mother on 20th April 1937: ‘Wishes for the future? We forms of human irrationality and violence, in all their gestations. are lucky if nothing happens. I don’t want the next European ca- And the constant coercion to serve that this war places on each and tastrophe to affect you during your lifetime; nor do I want it for everyone that works for the government, even on those that do not father’.75 have to fight, it creates so terrible effects within me, that I am in need of a spiritual anaesthetic so that I can avoid doing something explosive’.80 Albrecht also began to learn more about the men for ’ fl Hess s ight to Scotland whom he worked. He continued in the same letter: ‘One example: I am seated at a table with a man [Odilo Globocnik] whose duty it By the end of 1937, though, it was all too clear to Albrecht that will be to starve and freeze to death a large part of the German Jews Germany was heading for war. His work at the Dienststelle, in the that have been deported to the Jewish ghetto of Lublin, everything fi fi Foreign Of ce, and the con dential intelligence he read, inescap- according to the programme’.81 ably pointed to that conclusion. In particular, he knew well a

71 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 315e316. 72 K. von Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938e1945, Oxford, 1994. 73 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 145. 74 Jacobson, Karl Haushofer (note 17), Volume 2, 311. 75 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 328. 76 Quoted in J. Douglas-Hamilton, Motive for a Mission: The Story Behind Rudolf Hess’s Flight to Britain, Edinburgh, 1979, 79. 77 J. Douglas-Hamilton, Ribbentrop and war, Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1970) 45e63. 78 Jacobson, Karl Haushofer (note 17), Volume 2, 358e359. 79 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 201. 80 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 346. 81 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 374. The historian Michael Allen called Globocnik ‘the vilest man in the vilest organization ever known’, quoted in J. Kranjc and G. Joseph, To Walk with the Devil, Toronto, 2013, 124. 72 T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73

There was a growing realisation by Albrecht of the conse- Albrecht spent the last four months of his life at Moabit quences of his earlier complicity. The keen geographical intelli- composing his sonnets. In them we hear a man struck by the full gence he had deployed at the Dienststelle and Foreign Affairs was force of his complicity and guilt from earlier collaborations with the coming home to roost.82 Guilt about that complicity led him in Nazis. One of the Moabit sonnets (number 39) is called simply 1940 to consider joining the emerging resistance movement ‘Guilt’. Its second stanza is: against Hitler, such as the Red Orchestra and the Kreisau Circle (see Yet I am guilty otherwise than you think. also Heffernan’s paper, this issue).83 A friend, Karl Langbehn, introduced Albrecht to , a Prussian finance minister I should have recognized my duty sooner, more sharply and a member of the Mittwochsgesellschaft (the Wednesday Soci- named disaster as disaster e ety). Its cover was as a meeting club to discuss scientific questions, I withheld my judgment much too long.89 but its real purpose was to stimulate and organise resistance against the Nazis.84 Throughout 1940, though, Albrecht still worked By then it was too late for him to cross to safety on the moral for the government and Ribbentrop. All that changed on the eve- high wire on which he had previously precariously balanced. By the ning of 10th May 1941, when Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland. evening of 22nd April 1945 the Russian army was in the suburbs of News of Hess’s flight produced shock waves through the upper Berlin. Defeat was looming. Albrecht and fifteen of his fellow hierarchy of the Nazi leadership. Members of Hess’s staff were prisoners were told that they would be set free. The group con- arrested, Karl Haushofer’s home was searched, and Hess’s corre- sisted of several high-ranking military officers, professors and in- spondence with both Albrecht and Karl was seized by the Gestapo. dustrialists. When they were escorted after midnight to the prison The Nazis’s explanation of Hess’s action was that he suffered tem- gates they were met by a squad of SS-Sonderkommando. They were porary insanity, causing delusions of pacifism.85 Hitler thought told they were now being transferred to another facility for their Hess’s friendship with Albrecht might be the cause, and ordered own safety. Instead they were taken to nearby vacant land off Albrecht to be brought to Berchtesgaden on the 12th of May. Given Invalidenstrasse and summarily executed. One of the group mirac- pen and paper he was told to list all his British contacts under the ulously survived, Herbert Kosney. It was he who told Heinz heading of ‘English Connections and the Possibility of Utilizing Haushofer where he could find the body of his brother. When Heinz Them’.86 Afterwards he was sent to the Gestapo prison on Prinz found Albrecht three weeks after he had died, clutched in his hand Albrechtstrasse in Berlin and interrogated by both the head of the under his coat were five folded sheets of paper, his sonnets. Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, and by an SS-general, Reinhart Heydrich. He was released after only eight weeks.87 He left prison as a man Conclusion still under great suspicion, however. Furthermore, he and his family had lost their minder. Like Mephisto’s Hendrik Höfgen, both Karl and Albrecht Haushofer were at different times seduced by Nazism e by the heady sense of Moabit power and status that the regime afforded them. Albrecht was al- ways the more cautious, better able to resist Nazism’s temptations. After the Gestapo and SS interrogation, Albrecht left Foreign Affairs. Likely that was because he experienced its dark side early on, Nonetheless, some in Nazi high command thought that his pre-war having been defined as a Mischling and requiring special dispen- contacts with British diplomats might still be useful should Ger- sation to continue working. That said, Albrecht was hardly innocent many ever negotiate for peace. It was too early to kill him, or even to given that he was employed by Nazi high command until May 1941. lock him up in a concentration camp. Albrecht was allowed to He contributed to Nazi geopolitical decision-making and negotia- continue working at Berlin University as a professor. The trauma tion, certainly more directly than his father. At one point Albrecht around Hess’s flight to Scotland, though, hardened his resolve to even judged that Hitler had common sense. And until almost the contribute to the resistance movement. Through the Wednesday end, he was considered potentially useful by the Nazi regime. But Society he met members of the Kreisau Circle, and in particular Albrecht was wracked by guilt from his earlier complicity, and also Count von Stauffenberg. With him as well as others, Albrecht by the role that his own father played in letting the ‘daemon soar participated in hatching the 20th July 1944 plot to blow-up Hitler.88 into the world’. From at least 1940, and here he is unlike Höfgen, he That attempt failed. Hitler survived the bomb in part because of tried to assert an independent moral standpoint, joining the a sturdy table leg that absorbed the blast. Albrecht was not part of German resistance, helping and maybe influencing Hess in his plan the inner circle of plotters, but as soon as news of the failed attempt to negotiate peace with the British, and becoming one of the was out he fled Berlin. On 25th July he went into hiding in Bavaria, plotters to kill Hitler. His story, however, was never straightforward, avoiding capture until 7th December 1944, when he was brought and like other geographers enrolled by the Nazis his complicity was back to Berlin and imprisoned at Moabit. Even then his fate was not tangled, torn by moral struggle. fully determined. Himmler believed Albrecht’s pre-war relations Karl was always less critical of the Nazis than his son. He was with the British Foreign Service might benefit the Party if peace much more ready to change his own views, even his geopolitical negotiations occurred. theory, so that it complied with Nazi orthodoxy whatever that

82 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 349. 83 P. Hoffman, The History of the German Resistance, 1939e1945, 3rd edition, Montreal-Kingston, 1996; A. Nelson, Red Orchestra, The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, New York, 2009. 84 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 231. 85 R. Schmidt, Der Heb-flug und das kabinett Churchill. Hitler’s stellvertreter im kalkül der britischen kriegsdiplomatie Mai-Juni 1941, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 42 (1994) 1e38. 86 Brodersen, Albrecht Haushofer (note 57), 175. 87 Laack-Michel, Albrecht Haushofer (note 59), 239e241. 88 J. Theil, Der lehrkörper der Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität im Nationalsozialismus, in: M. Grüttner, H. E. Tenhort (Eds), Geschichte der Universität unter den Linden: Band 2: Die Berliner Universität zwischen den Weltkriegen 1918e1945, Berlin, 2012, 465e538. 89 Haushofer, Moabit Sonnets (note 57), 80. T.J. Barnes, C. Abrahamsson / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 64e73 73 might be. Karl’s heyday was during the second half of the 1930s to a ‘secluded hollow’ on their estate. Around 11 pm they drank a when he was multiply honoured, and when Nazi geopolitical cordial laced with arsenic, with Martha finishing the job by hanging strategy more or less accorded with his theory. After Hess flew to herself from a tree branch. Karl was too enfeebled to do the same, Scotland in May 1941, and, the next month, Germany invaded the dying ‘sprawled, face down’.93 Heinz found the corpses the next Soviet Union, Karl was doubly challenged. According to Haushofer’s day.94 He had gone to the house looking for them, and in their geopolitical theory, Germany should never have launched Opera- bedroom he discovered ‘letters of farewell. on the pillow, together tion Barbarossa.90 The heartland needed to stick together. One part with a neatly drawn diagram showing where the bodies would be of it should not invade another. Nonetheless, Karl Haushofer found’.95 Karl’s suicide note ended: ‘I want to be forgotten and modified his theory so that under its new formulation the Soviet forgotten’.96 invasion was not so bad. Roughly at the same time he also bowed to Against his wishes, the purpose of this paper has been to more racist interpretations of geopolitics offered by the Arbeitge- remember Karl Haushofer, as well as his son, Albrecht. Both may meinschaft für Geopolitik, emphasizing biology over environment.91 have been, as Troll suggests, tragic figures, but neither was In both cases his complicity became more entrenched, his inde- blameless.97 Like other German geographers, and other academic pendent moral standpoint even more difficult to achieve. labourers, and like Höfgen, in different ways and in different de- Karl Haushofer’s complicity with Nazism of course began much grees they colluded with the Nazis even though they were at times earlier, as implied by Albrecht’s sonnet, ‘My Father’. The exact in- distressed and tormented by the consequences. There is catharsis fluence of Karl Haushofer on Hitler is difficult to assess, given that from knowing about such tragic tangled complicity and moral the notes Hess kept of Haushofer’s prison teachings were destroyed struggle, however. It can deepen, enrich and complicate under- in 1945. But there remains the surviving textual evidence of Mein standing of the historical experience, without making the motives Kampf, as well as the historical record of Nazi invasion. The of the complicity appear either simply lurid or base. For this reason, geographical character of the Nazi project may well have been in the history of geographical thought should not only critically Hitler’s head before Haushofer’s lectures to him in Landsberg. Our interrogate the connivance of geographers and their geographical suggestion was that afterwards it became more formalized, took on imagination with the tragedies of the past and present. It should adefinite shape, and had its own vocabulary providing it further also explore the complicated complicities and moral struggles momentum. Hitler brought unimaginable horror on to the world. involved and which form part of the connivance. The biographies of But the terrible things he precipitated unfolded partly through the the two Haushofer geographers demonstrate that the line between complicity of others, and that included the ideas and actions of Karl perpetrators and victims is not always easily drawn. Haushofer. It is impossible to pinpoint exactly all the effects of Karl Haushofer’s complicity. One close to home was the unravelling of Acknowledgements his relationship with his son. Albrecht believed his father had been corrupted by Nazi power and status. His father, in contrast, after the This paper was presented in colloquia at the University of Califor- 20th July bombing of Wolfsschanze thought that his son was nia, Los Angeles, Queen Mary University of London, University disloyal and treacherous. A former student of Albrecht’s at Berlin College London, Nottingham University, and at the RGS-IBG annual University, Imegard Schnuhr, whose husband held high rank in the conference in Edinburgh, July 2012. It was also read by participants SS, thought she could arrange Albrecht’s release from Moabit prison in seminars at the universities of Kentucky and Nottingham with provided Karl helped. But Karl said: ‘Why should I do that? He has comments conveyed to the authors. We are enormously grateful for betrayed his country and his people and deserves no help from all the observations and questions we received on those occasions me’.92 and which significantly improved the paper. The article also greatly Karl Haushofer’s fate was as tragic as his son’s. A little less than a benefitted from the incisive criticisms of four referees as well as year after Albrecht’s murder, Karl Haushofer and his wife of nearly those of two editors. We are most indebted. Finally, we especially fifty years crept out late at night from their large farm house in appreciate the comments and editorial advice of Dan Clayton and Hartschimmelhof, Southern Bavaria. They went down a ‘dirt road’ Joan Seidl.

90 Blouet, Geopolitics and Globalization (note 7), 59e61. 91 Heske, Karl Haushofer (note 49); Natter, Geopolitics in Germany (note 27). 92 Quoted from ‘Spartacus Educational: Albrecht Haushofer’,11,www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhaushoferA.htm(last accessed 7th September 2014). 93 Walsh, Total Power (note 5), 33, 34. 94 M. Allen, The Hitler/Hess Deception: British Intelligence’s Best Kept Secret of the Second World War, London, 2003, suggests that Karl and Martha Haushofer were murdered at Hartschimmelhof by British secret agents on Churchill’s orders. According to Allen, it was done to keep secret that Hitler had tried to negotiate peace with the British using Hess, and to which both Haushofers were party. Allen’s theory is persuasively debunked by Ernst Haiger, Fiction, facts, and forgeries: The ‘revelations’ of Peter and Martin Allen about the history of the Second World War, Journal of Intelligence History 6 (2006) 105e118. 95 Walsh, Total Power (note 5), 33. 96 Jacobson, Karl Haushofer (note 17), Volume 2, 389, footnote 1. 97 Troll, Geographic science (note 1), 132.